Martini Shot

The first thing an amateur writer does, when he sits down to create a television series, is to figure it all out.  He'll map out characters, interrelationships, future story arcs, possible late season developments -– you know, actually create a series...

A few years ago, a friend of mine shot a pilot. It was supposed to be a promising pilot, but somewhere between the script and casting, the network started getting concerned about the darkly comic tone, the suggestive, edgy storylines, and the sharpness of the writing. All of those items introduce a level of risk into the development process -- career risk for the executives, specifically -- so usually that's the first stuff they want out...

I have an actress friend from India -- she's a Bollywood starlet -- and she tells me that over there, if you're a Bollywood star and you're married, and you want to stay a Bollywood star, you have to keep your marriage a secret...

So, apparently, if you want to get out of jury duty, what you have to do is this.  When they ask you what you do for a living, you say, "I write television comedy, your honor," and then you wait around a bit while the judge and the lawyers busy themselves with other prospective jurors, but you're eventually going to hear something like, "The court would like to excuse the television comedy writer with the expensive watch"...

When you pitch a pilot to the network, or to anyone, really, you often find yourself saying stupid things like, "And the great thing is, there are, like, zillions of story ideas with this situation," when in fact there aren't zillions of story areas, or even millions of story areas, or even, really, more than, say, eight story ideas to anything...

A writer friend of mine told me this story a few weeks ago. He’s walking back to his office from the studio commissary when he runs into an old friend of his, also a writer.  He and this guy worked together on a show a few years ago, and they’re friends.  Well, not friends as in “friendly” or “nice to each other"...

My wonderful dog died a year ago, and I spent the past year staring at other people’s dogs in a way, frankly, that I sometimes stare at other people’s girlfriends.  “Why are you with him?” “What’s that relationship all about?”  That kind of thing.

It's the end of pilot season.  In less than two weeks, the networks announce their picks for the fall 2007 schedule.  The process which began in January with hope and optimism and a sense that the TV business really wasn't in decline, really could pull itself back up, ends in New York, at some huge venue, with the president of each network appearing before a crowd of media buyers at the big ad agencies selling the upcoming fall season.  They call this the "upfronts," because this is when networks try to sell a lot of their ad time upfront, before the shows premiere, before the 80 to 90 percent new show failure rate kicks in...

A friend of mine was working on a pilot last year for a big star who had a big deal at one of the big TV networks.  It was a great idea for a show, and he's a great writer, and the actor liked him, so on the face of it, it seemed like a sure thing....

When I tell people what I do for a living -- which, for the record, I try not to do; mostly I tell people that I'm a merchant banker and leave it at that; when you say "merchant banker," I've found, there are no follow ups -- but for the times when I actually tell people that I write and produce television comedies, what I hear back is either "You should do a sitcom about everybody in the payroll department. Crazy.  Crazy funny," or something a little more aggressive and challenging, like "So what do you do now?  Sit around and live off of your Cheers residuals?"...

A few years ago, we had a pilot ordered to series.   I know, I know: hard to believe.  But there was a time, I promise, when thing like that did happen...

It turns out that Viacom is suing YouTube, which isn't really much of a surprise. Viacom will eventually sue us all, for something. That's kind of how they do business. Here's how it went down...

When Bob Crane, the star of TV's Hogan's Heroes, was found murdered in an Arizona motel in the late 1970's, among his personal effects were several hundred pounds of video equipment.  Crane had state-of-the-art equipment for 1974: a huge video camera, a heavy playback tape machine (roughly the size of four microwave ovens stacked together), and enough lights to form a small production company.

So, how do I do this?  On the one hand, I want to share something about a certain network.  This certain network ordered a pilot recently based on the caveman character in the Geico insurance ads.  Have you seen them?  Kind of funny.  The idea is that if you're a caveman somehow living in today's world -- I don't mean like a caveman, I mean an actual caveman, with eyebrow ridges and stringy  hair and like that -- anyway, the point of the commercial is that if you were such a caveman, making your way in the modern world, you'd have to deal with a lot of prejudice.  People thinking you're stupid or oafish or dazzled by fire or whatever...

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.  Said Samuel Johnson, at some point, to someone.  Good advice...

Now that I'm officially not making a pilot, and am  deep into my seasonal I'm-quitting-this-idiotic-business muttering and stomping around, I need to get something off of my chest....

This year, I had two pilot scripts in contention for the fall 2007 season.  Both of them are now, in the words of the networks that paid for them, technically dead.  Technically dead.  Not dead.  Not alive, certainly.  But dead, technically...

A few years ago, we shot a pilot for a network that didn't want it. They were cornered by something called a "pilot commitment" -- which means, essentially, that at some point someone at the network agreed to pay a huge penalty (something pretty close to the cost of producing a pilot) if they didn't produce the pilot. So, faced with the prospect of paying one-million-two for a something and one-million-one for nothing, they thought, "Okay, what the heck. Make it. But we hate it. But make it. Even though we hate it..."